Loner in the Desert

By ROBERT HUGHES

Fifty years ago, Georgia O'Keeffe was the muse and queen bee of the New York avantgarde. A small, aggressive coterie, its social life revolved around the "291" Gallery, run by O'Keeffe's future husband, Alfred Stieglitz. O'Keeffe was beautiful, then as now, and Stieglitz's pictures of her over their long years together form the greatest love poem in the history of photography. But painters in the "291" circle, like Marsden Hartley and John Marin, found it hard to believe that somebody who did the cooking might also be a serious painter.

Even before Stieglitz died in 1946, his wife had quit New York to spend the summer months in seclusion in the Southwest. Since then, she has been known as America's "leading woman artist"--a boldly condescending phrase--and largely dismissed as irrelevant by generations weaned on Pollock and Kline. To younger painters, her articulate images of mountain, bone and desert looked merely provincial. The milk train of history, having stopped at Tenth Street to pick up the Abstract Expressionists, could not be expected to halt at so remote a siding as Abiquiu, N. Mex. But if it could be ignored for the wrong reasons, her work was sometimes praised for worse ones--as if it were a grassroots, Middle-American riposte to creeping internationalism.

This week the Whitney Museum opens a major retrospective of O'Keeffe's paintings. It should scotch the myth of her provinciality forever. O'Keeffe emerges from it as an archetypal individualist who knew about styles other than her own, who delved back to the roots of modernism (such as Oriental art) to discover her own direction, found it, and moved on. If she is a loner at 82, it is because of her special vision. To call her "provincial" because her images are mainly drawn from New Mexico is like calling Gauguin provincial because he worked in Tahiti.

Strenuous Responsibility. "Clean" is the adjective Georgia O'Keeffe's paintings constantly invite: clean as a bone, as a desert rock, as a haiku. She refutes the idea that discipline is masculine. O'Keeffe may, in a special sense, be the most aristocratic artist America has yet produced. This quality has nothing to do with a grand manner. It lies in its antithesis: her aloofness and precision, her refusal to make any gesture for the sake of effect. Every work in this show, from the earliest calligraphic wash drawings to the recent ones, like Road Past the View, stands to the art of painting as Shaker barns do to architecture--plain, the forms reduced to their simplest and most mysterious denominators, not an ounce of fat left. She works on a level of strenuous responsibility that other American figurative artists never reach, or attain only in brief spurts. This lean resilience is as distinct in O'Keeffe's early landscapes of upstate New York, like Lake George with Crows, as it is in her desert paintings of the '60s.

Her unblinking self-scrutiny, carried to the point where the self becomes as transparent as water, is demanding and hard to take. But it gives her as much claim as Jackson Pollock had to be numbered among the exemplary figures of modern American culture. O'Keeffe appropriated the 19th century image of the Pioneer Woman (as Pollock took that of the Roaring Boy) and, against all odds, made it work. Wrinkled and spry, fiercely committed to work and solitude, she lives isolated on her New Mexico ranch with two servants and a pair of eleven-year-old chow dogs for company ("They bite very well; I've seen quite a few visitors I didn't want go off with blood sloshing out of their shoes")--a paradigm of the frontier experience which Thoreau tried with less success to live at Walden.

Far and Near. O'Keeffe's images are an amalgam of sweep and intimacy.

The title of one of her best-known paintings, which depicts a deer skull with vast antlers hovering above a range of hills, is From the Faraway Nearby; it reflects her gift for telescopic and microscopic sight. On one hand, her work is obsessed with landscapes-as-epic, landscape as an active protagonist, exerting the immense dumb power of its presence on human intruders. "Those hills!" she exclaims, in front of a canvas of 1944, Black Place III. "They go on and on--it was like looking at two miles of gray elephants." In fact, her love of epic scale (although her paintings are startlingly small) provides the sole point of contact between her work and Abstract Expressionism--the expansive image of American bigness.

In a sense, her paintings are like the desert itself, where there is no apparent middle ground: everything is either far or near, held in a hallucinatory clarity. In O'Keeffe's tender, expanded details of Jimson weed, desert roses, shingles and pebbles, a generation used to psychedelics will recognize a part of its own experience--reality declaring its inexhaustible fullness. Perhaps it is the concentration of such images, with their shifts of scale and razor-sharp exactitude, that leads some viewers to compare them to Surrealism. But surrealist imagery is, almost by definition, fantastic, whereas O'Keeffe's paintings insist that they are not dreams: the commonest object unfolds itself, seen awake in full sunlight. She is not a metaphorical artist (everything is what it is, and stands for nothing else), but her work is full of correspondences. There is not a nude in the show, not even a figure; yet her images are a rich and complex statement about female sexuality. All the other sexual painters are men and, like Picasso, treat women as objects. They paint what it is like to want a woman; O'Keeffe paints what it is to be one--at a level of the psyche which no man can reach.

Of her work, Georgia O'Keeffe once remarked: "Sometimes I have resisted painting something that seemed to me so ordinary, hardly worth doing. But when I do it and it's done, it's different from what other people see. It is ordinary to me, but not to you." Precisely. O'Keeffe's laconic familiarity with her own images is oddly reminiscent of William Blake's after-dinner chats with the Prophet Ezekiel. Vision, even mysticism, sits on her like a well-worn old coat. No other American artist, and few living painters anywhere, have fused their inner and outer worlds with such spare grace. The life and work are one.

Robert Hughes

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